View full sizeJerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerRobert Urbanski, pictured here, filled out complaints at Edison police headquarters this morning alleging official misconduct -- a felony punishable by up to two years in prison -- against Chief Thomas Bryan, Lt. Joseph Shannon and Lt. Gregory Formica, a former internal affairs investigator.

EDISON — Retired police officer Robert Urbanski said he went through three months of hell.

And for that, he wants his former boss, Edison Police Chief Thomas Bryan, to go to prison for up to a decade.

In a case that’s unusual even by the standards of Edison, where the politics are played rough and the lawsuits multiply like lawn mushrooms, Urbanski filed criminal complaints today against Bryan and two other police supervisors, alleging he was denied medical assistance after a blood exchange with a burglary suspect in 2008.

The suspect claimed to have AIDS.

Urbanski, 44, says that in retaliation for a previous incident, Bryan and Lt. Joseph Shannon waited nearly a month to obtain a warrant to draw blood from the man, a process Urbanski says should have taken a day or two.

In the meantime, he said, he was forced to take the maximum doses of two anti-AIDS drugs that ravaged his body, sapping his energy and leaving him so sick he was unable to leave the bathroom at times. The drugs’s effects lingered for two months after the regimen ended, he said.

“When my son started school in the first grade, he was crying,” Urbanski said. “He thought I was going to die.”

Ultimately, blood tests showed the suspect had hepatitis but not HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Urbanski did not contract hepatitis. He retired on disability in 2010 for an unrelated condition, a back injury caused when his cruiser was rammed.

The former officer argues his commanders’ behavior rises to the level of official misconduct, a second-degree crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

He filed an identical complaint against Lt. Gregory Formica, an internal affairs officer at the time. Urbanski claims Formica whitewashed the alleged wrongdoing when he was asked to look into it.

Bryan, reached on vacation today, called the complaint against him meritless, saying it was linked to a campaign by some in the department to force his resignation.

“This is just another overt attempt by a group of officers to get me out of office,” he said. “And I want to make it clear. I’m not leaving.”

Jim O’Neill, a spokesman for the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office, said the county’s presiding municipal court judge, Edward Herman, will assign the case to a municipal judge outside of Edison. A hearing will then determine if there is probable cause for further action.

If the judge finds the complaints have merit, they will be forwarded to the prosecutor’s office for further action, O’Neill said.

Across New Jersey, officers file civil suits against their own departments with some regularity, but Urbanski’s criminal complaints appear to be a rarity.

“Obviously, this is highly unusual,” said Wayne Fisher, executive director of the Police Institute at Rutgers University in Newark.

Urbanski, who worked summers as a part-time officer at the Jersey Shore before joining the Edison police in 1999, had previously filed suit against the department over the incident.

He said today that he had planned all along to file the criminal complaints once the civil suit was resolved, but because of repeated delays in his trial date, he feared going beyond the criminal statute of limitations.

The exchange of blood occurred Sept. 1, 2008, when Urbanski tangled with a burglary suspect who had jumped through a window, cutting himself in the process. During the scuffle, bloody glass pierced Urbanski’s finger.

He said the suspect, once handcuffed, told him, “I have AIDS and hepatitis, and I hope you die.”

Afterward, he said he and his doctor repeatedly contacted the department for the blood warrant, to no avail.

Urbanski contends his superiors were retaliating against him for an incident in 2005, when he talked a suicidal officer out of killing himself. He said he informed a supervisor, who should have filed a report but did not. In the end, Urbanski claims, managers banded together to blame him for the failure to write a report. He said he was harassed for his remaining years in the department.